ANCIENT EARTHWORKS.
Ancient Earthworks. By J, Charles Wall. (Talbot. 2s. ad. not.) —This little book is one of the series of "Antiquaries' Primers," which is designed for the elementary instruction of the layman with antiquarian leanings. The subject dealt with in this volume is not one that makes so obvious an appeal as, say, that of mediaeval architecture, for the study of earthworks involves the comprehension of many terms that have little or no significance nowadays, and the eye of faith is frequently needed to aid in recognising the almost obliterated traces that in some places mark the strongholds of our ancestors. But the subject has a fascination that is all its own, and in the hundred and forty pages of which this booklet is composed ample justice is done to it by moans of careful and intelligible classification, some excellent plates, and more than sixty illustrations of the formation of earthworks. Care has been taken to use no terms unintelligible to the layman without an explanation of their full significance, and in consequence even those whose memory of a Roman camp as explained in their schooldays is of the haziest kind will find no baffling and annoying phraseology to contend with. The book is indispensable to all who in their journeying over the countryside desire to have something more trustworthy than local tradition to explain those curious formations of the ground which serve better than any history-book to show what a pit of universal strife were these islands in the centuries before the Conquest.
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